Hi Terry,
> > the advice is 'So it looks like the |ff55| UUID that it's
> > complaining about is sda1, presumably the / partition'.
>
> In Partition Magic, only sda1 is acknowledged, except in in the tool
> 'TestDisc' (see below).
Don't forget that booting from a different source, say a USB drive,
might re-arrange what drive is sda.
Commands which help observe what's what to find what your normal sda
drive is now called:
sudo -i blkid
sudo -i lsblk
sudo -i lsblk -o
rm,rota,type,name,size,fssize,fsavail,label,partlabel,vendor,model,serial,mountpoint
> > This just means the disk is happy to return bytes for each of the
> > logical sectors on the disk, not that the bytes make sense as
> > filesystems, or that the files within make sense for booting.
>
> Do SMART Extended Tests are not really much use unless the disc is
> physically damaged?
The tests help rule that out. It's the drive doing the test internally.
It knows nothing of what operating system is used, what filesystem, etc.
It can do nothing but confirm it can read bytes and get the same
checksum it stored for them on writing.
> While I was booted into Parted Magic, I tried to run fsck on both sda
> and sda1. Nothing much seemed to happen. What should I expect?
Well, assuming you've ext4 filesystems, then
sudo -i e2fsck -n /dev/sdc1
would trundle through the filesystem data stored in that partition,
checking if all's well. The -n means change nothing if a fault is
found: sometimes the fix can make things worse so it's worth cogitating
rather than going ahead. See e2fsck(8).
Though, given your original error message, I don't think it's the
filesystem which is corrupt, but the initial RAM disk isn't set up
somehow which is what some of the links described. An fsck would rule
out filesystem corruption, just as a SMART test ruled out unreadable
sectors.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
--
Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2026-01-06 20:00
Check to whom you are replying
Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... https://dorset.lug.org.uk
New thread, don't hijack: mailto:[email protected]
